Looking at an expense. Food & drinks, 10 € on the 21st… What was that? My stare at the expense grows emptier by the second, perfectly reflecting the emptiness of my memory. If I only remembered where I had spent that. Easy solution: add a location to expenses in the future and the problem will go away. Plus, I’ll get a pretty cool spending map in the end.
When adding an expense or income, tap the location button on the bottom left of the screen. The suggestions of nearby locations and venues will show up.
The locations displayed are the Foursquare venues that exist in your immediate surroundings. If you already see the venue where you spent your money, just tap on it and the location will be added with your expense. Save the expense and that’s it.
Clicking on the mini map on the expense details will open it in Google Maps.
What if the right location isn’t on the list?
If the location isn’t on the list, but you’re sure it should be near, tap “More locations” below the list of suggestions.
You’ll get a longer list with more suggestions of venues around you. If it still doesn’t show up, or the actual location of the venue is different from where you are right now, try searching for it.
This works well if you’re adding an expense when you’re at the actual location, but if you’re already some where else, or want to make it more precise, we have another trick up our sleeve.
You can also specify the town or city where the expense took place. Simply type-in the name of the venue you’re looking for, add a comma (,) and add the town or city where the venue is. For example: “Costa Coffee, London”.
For even more precise searching, you can also paste in the coordinates to display the venues around that location. This option is only available in the Web App though. See the Locations blog post for the web app.
Locations map
Once you’ve been diligently noting your locations with the expenses for a while, a nice map of your spending activities will start drawing out in the locations section. Click on one of the dots and the details for that location will show up.
If you’ve been spending at a single location multiple times, these entries will be summed up on the location. Now you can finally know how much your crush on that cute waiter or waitress has been costing you.
Filtering locations and filtering by locations
The locations map, like all the data in Toshl, depends on the filtering options that you have set up. By default the map will display all the locations in your current financial month. Need to see where you’ve been spending all the time that you’ve been using Toshl? Set the time span to all time. Voila, all your stops, on one handy map.
In the web app you can also filter by tag or category, not just the time or accounts.
What about the sum for the entire franchise?
While this approach is great for tallying up spending at an individual venue, it comes a bit short if you would like to tally up all your spending at an entire franchise, not just a single venue. For example, to know how much have you spent at all the E. Leclerc stores, not just the one in Ljubljana. If you need that information, you can still add a tag with the franchise title to each such expense and all your expenses at that franchise will be summed up using the tag. There is something to be said about places that are unique, though. ;)